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THE next recruits in the war against global warming could be rice plants.

About 10 to 15 per cent of all emissions of the greenhouse gas methane come from rice paddies, and most of this originates from the plants themselves.

But when a team led by Heinz Rennenberg of the Fraunhofer Institute for Atmospheric Environmental Research in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, measured the methane production from 22 modern, high-yielding rice strains, they found an eightfold difference in those emissions from strain to strain (Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, vol 91, p 59). This gives breeders plenty of leeway to modify the trait through …

IT’S not just torrential floods that carve out river valleys. The persistent action of gentler, normal flows turns out to do a lot of the work too.

The finding helps settle a long-running argument about whether floods or normal flow cause the most erosion. Careful measurements in the Liwu River in Taiwan’s central mountain range show that while both are important, normal flow does the most digging at the bottom of the river channel (Science, vol 297, p 2036).

It still takes a big flood to cut into the valley walls and widen the stream, however, according to Rudy …

HAVING more liquor outlets in your neighbourhood is associated with a higher rate of suicides locally, at least in New Mexico.

In an analysis of data from 11 counties in the state, Luis Escobedo of the New Mexico Department of Health and Melchor Ortiz from the University of Texas at El Paso found that those with more bars, liquor stores and convenience stores had more suicides. Each extra liquor outlet in a county meant 2.3 more suicides per 10,000 people between 1990 and 1994. The researchers suggest that drinking increases the chances that people who are mentally ill will decide …

TESTS on 8318 tonsils and appendixes extracted from people in Britain have yielded the first estimate of how many people are expected to succumb to the brain disease vCJD, the human form of BSE. Only one sample was contaminated with the prion proteins that cause the disease. If this rate of contamination is typical, 120 people in every million who were between 10 and 50 years old between 1995 and 1999 are now infected, say researchers led by David Hilton of Derriford Hospital in Plymouth and James Ironside at the National CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh (British Medical Journal, vol …

RECHARGEABLE batteries are set to become less expensive and more environmentally friendly, thanks to a small tweak to an old material.

Top-quality rechargeable batteries used in everything from laptops to mobile phones rely on expensive compounds called lithium metal oxides. In the 1970s, researchers suggested that the cheaper lithium iron phosphate might be used as an alternative, but it proved very poor at conducting electricity. Now Yet-Ming Chiang and colleagues at MIT’s Materials Science Lab have solved that problem by doping it with a tiny amount of a suitable metal, such as niobium.

ASTRONOMERS are calling for a mission to re-investigate a 30-year-old mystery, hoping to gain a new insight into the origin of life on Earth.

Measurements of sunlight reflected from Mercury’s surface have shown that the majority of minerals on the planet all twist light the same way. Minerals such as quartz can exist in left and right “handed” forms, and these mirror-image versions are usually found in roughly equal quantities.

But Mercury has an over-abundance of left-handers and no one knows why. Some biologists think such minerals could have acted as a template for early life, explaining why Earth’s organic …